Exploring computational materials for fashion: recommendations for designing fashionable wearables

Abstract

Fashion is becoming an inevitable part of wearable devices. Yet, it is not clear how the cross-pollination between computational materials and fashion design might suggest directions for fashion designers who are unfamiliar to this concept. Exploring this territory is important for providing actionable directions to those individuals in exploring fashionable expressions. Therefore, we followed a three-pillared research through design method: (1) a design workshop with 14 fashion design and six engineering students, in which they created seven artifacts by exploring computational and fashion materials, (2) analysis of the workshop outcomes to extract design themes on how computational materials provided interactive opportunities for fashion designers, and (3) semi-structured interviews with 10 wearable design experts from different countries on the results of our analysis. Then, we refined our findings from feedback provided by the experts to finally formulate five design recommendations for designers along with the strategies that they can follow for applying them. In this respect, the recommendations we developed are as follows: (1) giving information through fabric augmentation, (2) defining bi-directional interaction between the contexts and garments, (3) controlling the form of the garments, (4) embellishing surfaces, and (5) supporting the three-dimensional shape of the garment with computational materials.